Yukon Night

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Yukon Night

Photograph by Paul Nicklen, National Geographic

The aurora borealis dances above Robert Bruce’s smokehouse on a cold autumn night on the Porcupine River in Canada's Yukon. When Bruce was seven years old, his parents taught him how to butcher the caribou and smoke the fish that sustain the Vuntut Gwitchin people—among the last in North America to meet most of their nutritional needs through hunting and gathering—through the long Arctic winters.

See more pictures from the February 2014 feature story “Yukon: Canada’s Wild West."